Employability Skills - Listening

Listening Ability

“Are you listening?” At home “Hmmm”… In school “Yes, ma’am”…. At work “Yes” or a nod. How many of us really listen? Perhaps the most underrated aspect of communication is listening ability. People tend to be confused about hearing and listening.

Hearing is an unplanned automatic reaction to sounds that requires no effort. We are surrounded by sounds most of the time. We filter out sounds that mean little to us and choose to hear sounds that are important to us. Listening is focused and determined. It requires enthusiasm and effort. Listening is active, focused, and targeted concentration for appreciating the meanings expressed by a speaker.

 The people-oriented listener is paying concentration to the speaker. The listeners listen to the message in order to master how the speaker thinks and how they feel about their message. The people-oriented listener is likely to be more attentive to the speaker than to the message. If you tend to be such a listener, appreciate that the message is about what is important to the speaker.

The action-oriented listeners are primarily interested in finding out what the speaker wants. Action-oriented listening is sometimes called task-oriented listening. In it, the listener seeks a clear message about what needs to be done, and might have less patience for listening to the reasons behind the task.

The content-oriented listeners are interested in the message itself, whether it makes sense, what it means, and whether it’s accurate. When you give a speech, several members of your audience will be content-oriented listeners who will be interested in mastering from you.

People using a time-oriented listening style prefer a message that gets to the point quickly. Time-oriented listeners can become impatient with slow delivery or lengthy explanations. This kind of listener may be receptive for only a brief amount of time and may become rude or even hostile if the speaker expects a longer focus of concentration.

Some of the factors that interfere with good listening might exist beyond our control, but others are manageable. It’s helpful to be aware of these factors so that they interfere as little as possible with appreciating the message.

Noise is one of the biggest factors to interfere with listening; it can be defined as anything that interferes with your ability to attend to and appreciate a message. There are several kinds of noise, but we will focus on only the four you are most likely to encounter in public speaking situations: physical noise, psychological noise, physiological noise, and semantic noise.

A person can only maintain focused concentration for a finite length of time. You have probably noticed that even when your concentration is ‘glued’ to something in which you are deeply interested, every now and then you pause to do something else, such as getting a drink of water, stretching, or looking out the window.

The limits of the human concentration span can interfere with listening, but listeners and speakers can use strategies to prevent this interference.

Good listening involves keeping an open mind and withholding judgment until the speaker has completed the message. Conversely, biased listening is characterized by jumping to conclusions. Everyone has biases, but good listeners have mastered to hold them in check while listening.

Listening or receiver apprehension is the fear that you might be unable to appreciate the message or process the information correctly or be able to adapt your thinking to include the new information coherently.

As a speaker, you can reduce listener worry by defining terms clearly and using simple visual aids to hold the audience’s concentration. You don’t want to underestimate or overestimate your audience’s knowledge on a subject, so good audience analysis is always important.

Never underestimate the power of soft ability like active listening. Your resume may look great, with a strong array of professional experience and training, but employer are also looking for people who have the ability to communicate and to team well with others.